Fundamental Data Records for Altimetry
ESA Contract No. 4000128220/19/I-BG
Period: 2019 – 2021 (24 months)
Partners: The consortium is leaded by CLS (France) with the collaboration of other 8 partners:
- IRPI CNR: Istituto di Ricerca per la Protezione Idrogeologica (Subcontractor)
- LEGOS, France (http://www.legos.obs-mip.fr/, Subcontractor)
- Finnish Meteorological Institute, Finland (https://en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/, FMI, Subcontractor)
- INFORMUS, Germany (http://informus.de/, Subcontractor)
- NOVELTIS, France (https://www.noveltis.com/, Subcontractor)
- National Physical Laboratory, United Kingdom (https://www.npl.co.uk/, NPL, Subcontractor)
- University of Leeds School of Earth and Environment, United Kingdom (https://www.npl.co.uk/, NPL, Subcontractor)
- Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany (https://www.awi.de/, AWI, Subcontractor)
Description: The generation of long-term records of calibrated and quality-controlled Earth Observation (EO) data has become nowadays a crucial issue, as comprehension and monitoring of global environmental processes have led to an increasing demand for accurate and stable time series of data spanning decades.
With the advent of the European EO Long Term Data Preservation (LTDP) program, ESA has supported sustained activities aimed at guarantee long-term value to the great wealth of science data from satellite heritage missions, with the objective of improving the performance of the existing data holdings, and ensuring interoperability and continuity towards current and future missions.
The FDR4ALT project aims to define and generate Fundamental Data Records (FDR) and Thematic Data Products (TDP) for radar altimeters and microwave radiometer instruments for the whole data asset from ERS-1, ERS-2 to ENVISAT, with potential extension to other datasets (e.g., CryoSat-2, Sentinel-3, etc).
FDR4ALT products aim to fulfil the needs from several scientific communities: Ocean and Coastal Sea Level, Wave Height, Polar Ocean and Sea Ice, Land Ice and Inland Waters, MicroWave Radiometer/Atmophere.
In summary, FDR4ALT will:
- answer the user needs by providing access to products with higher resolution but still easy to use products;
- complement usefully the overall altimetry product catalogues offered by the different agencies and projects;
- provide a missing link between expert altimetry community and end users less familiar with altimetry.
More information are available at the website: https://www.fdr4alt.org/